I think this sufficiently sums up my take:
The fact that that's an option at all makes Lemmy considerably better than Reddit.
this post was submitted on 13 Apr 2025
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Problem is it requires bot runners to be honest.
You can probably get your instance admin to ban any bot accounts that aren't being honest, which is also a step up for Reddit.
how do we distinguish bots from real accounts?
Can bots respond to direct messages or replies?
In theory you can write scripts with Selenium to do anything a regular user would do. Most bots have limits but it's always possible to basically write scripts that virtually click buttons, write content, post content, etc.
yes
If we want to, how do we disincentive them?
Bots are fine on any platform as long as they are clearly labeled and easy to filter out if you prefer.
Doesn’t bother me. You can always block them individually like users if they are cluttering up your feed.
I like the news bots as I’m thinking a lot of content wouldn’t be posted without them. That being said, would prefer more human engagement, but we’ll get there!
All instance banned with prejudice.
How do you feel about down voting them?
Would would the point even be? They're mindless spambots no one asked for.
On my instance, I just ban them and defederate from repost instances. On my LW account, I was blocking the accounts individually and have since blocked metawire.eu entirely since it's nothing but automated repost slop.
It's like every couple months, some new joker comes along and thinks "gee, golly, it's empty here compared to R****t. I bet people will appreciate it if I made a bot to spam out content" and pats themselves on the back for a spam well done.
Annoying as shit
As soon as I see a few posts from a bot in a row, I block it
I just block them on sigth, especially the one made by people that think we want RSS feeds.
I always enjoyed browsing 'new'. Both here and on that other site you might know of. Personally i dont like the bots here. They just clutter the timeline IMHO. I visit 'social media' for a feed which is pre-curated by humans. I'd rather use RSS if i wanted a constant stream of news articles without curation by others. The problem i see on lemmy is that in rare cases the bot posts still get user engagement which i miss out on if i just outright filter the bots out.
Its nothing i lose sleep over and the situation as is... is alright i guess. But if i had anything to say and had a choice i would outright ban them. But tbh i didnt think through the consquences.
I turned on the option to hide bots so I don't see them.
I wish there was an option to turn off link-only posts. At least have something in the body of the post. Maybe a quote or a TLDR. Otherwise it just feels like a bot posting.
Good now, bad later.
Lemmy is small enough to only have useful bots now. Naively, I think policing bot content across instances will grow into a nightmare the day that policing is needed.
I haven't seen a bot in a long long time here.
When I used imgur, it had 2 bots, this time last year and a repost detecting bot. I thought that was useful, and the userbase over time got sick of the repost one.
When I used reddit, with all of the different subreddits, every dork on there felt like they needed to create a bot for any niche or joke but they made it opt out, instead of in. That was excessive and i found it annoying.
I hope Lemmy stays closer to the first example, or no bots at all.
I blocked one of them. I want humans.
I have bot accounts blocked in the user settings. Bots can't laugh at my jokes.
None of them do their language settings well.
I don't quite understand. Will you expand on that?
I'm talking about Lemmy bots in general, on any instances.
I view all and have to block bots fairly often as they're posting things in languages I can't read in large amounts.
I think they're supposed to use language tags and are not, but I just block them because of there being a large amount of unhelpful content.
And let's be honest, there's always gonna be a ton of that, hence my filtering. But if the people making bots to post content could make sure the posts are properly marked, I wouldn't need to block them and would continue to see the content they post that I can read.
Each Lemmy comment (and post) has a field for its language to be set so people can filter out ones they don't speak. Sounds like some bots aren't configured properly
Not once have I encountered one. I don’t mind them, though
I am not a fan. I don't like link dumps. It doesn't create a discussion and the article or whatever is being relayed might be total shit and there could be better or more direct sources.
If I saw a Hackaday article about a neat project on GitHub I wouldn't just post the article with the original title. I would probably link the GitHub page and in the body of the post link the article with a quote and maybe post similar projects in case people are interested.
I specifically dislike the bots that repost content from Reddit. The communities they post to feel fake and end up receiving so many posts actual Lemmy users posting to them get washed away in the flood.
It's not a big deal for some communities (ex. Nature photos) but doesn't make sense for discussion focused ones.
I block those bots